editorial

800-pound gorillas

So is Pedro Miguel González "an 800-pound gorilla in the room" of US-Panamanian relations like Charlie Rangel says?

The Honorable Representative from New York who serves as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee surely knows the score on Capitol Hill. He might even know the score in Panama, although if he does the public statements he makes about us are evidence not only of a willing suspension of disbelief but of an active role in the propagation of certain myths.

The cited 800-pound gorilla factor is a product of the Torrijos administration's choice. The PRD knew that its selection of González to head the National Assembly would be a problem and its leaders were repeatedly reminded of that. They chose to provoke the United States for whatever bizarre reason or set of reasons they have bouncing around in their heads.

People who support the US-Panama free trade pact despite this irritant argue that treaties are between nations, not individual leaders. They say that the creepy Pedro Miguel González will soon enough come down from his present prominent perch.

The problem is that corruption with impunity is a lot more firmly entrenched in Panamanian political life than is Deputy González. On the same day that Senator Baucus was declaring that there could be no debate or vote on the free trade pact with Panama so long as the González issue remains "unresolved," Panamanians were learning about another infamous Supreme Court decision, this time ratifying the validity of a contract given to the business partner of one of the top officials in charge of deciding who got that contract. While certain congressional Democrats have hailed the assurances they were given about how Panamanian labor and environmental laws would be respected, here we are reminded every day by huge construction projects underway without the required environmental permits and by the constant and notorious flouting of labor laws that these matters are dead letters here.

To the extent that events on Capitol Hill are like works of Hollywood fiction, there is a certain internal logic to Charlie Rangel's casting of Pedro Miguel González in the King Kong role. However, if the senators and representatives care to deal with things as they really are, it's the work of fiction that passes for the rule of law in Panama that ought to be causing the ruckus in the room.

Israel, the Americans and the rest of the world

On the campaign trail, the leading Democratic presidential primary candidates who are trying to appeal to the antiwar movement about Iraq say the most hawkish things about Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile in Israel, the most hawkish politicians are advising that any warnings that the Bush administration gives about the long-term effect of their country's treatment of its Palestinian neighbors may be safely ignored because the Republicans are weakened and will likely lose the White House soon enough. Meanwhile in the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations, the steady stream of condemnation against Israel continues unabated.

Israel's faults are very real but hardly unique. It's the last of the settler states, an expansionist practitioner of ethnic cleansing, a country whose government practices torture, political assassination and press censorship with fewer pretenses than the others who do these things. Anti-Semitism is one of several reasons why Israel gets called on its misconduct a lot more than the Sudan or Burma or Guatemala does, but one need not be a racist to notice that Israel has not lived up to its billing as "a light among nations."

The reality is, however, that Israel is "among nations," and there are some extreme antagonists like the current president of Iran out there who champion its abolition. Since the Jewish state's inception the United States has taken on the role of guarantor of Israel's existence and that won't change nor should it.

What ought to change are a few long-standing American presumptions about its role in the Middle East.

One useless concept that needs to go is the crazy idea that the United States, as principal defender of one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, can ever be in a position to serve as a credible mediator in this dispute. That's an inherent conflict of interest that surely all of the lawyers who are running for president ought to recognize.

Another idea that has no legitimate place in US foreign policy on this or any other subject is that American commitments have no limits. It's an onerous enough burden to guarantee that the President Ahmadinejads of this world won't be allowed to destroy Israel, but that assurance should never be extended to one of support for, or even a winking acceptance of, every obnoxious thing that the Israelis might do to their neighbors.

The basic concept of Israel as a "bulwark of democracy" in the Middle East, once the surface is scratched, becomes the notion of a strong military ally in a region where the United States has "strategic interests," and upon examination of the use of the ubiquitous "s-word" in this context it all becomes a matter of oil. However, it is now a pressing matter of America's survival as a great nation to shed its dependence on imported energy resources, and if that step toward self-preservation is taken then all the facade of fanciful notions about what Israel is supposed to be start to crumble away.

What would remain is this isolated little country that the United States has long promised to protect.

Bear in mind...